Latest news

As implied earlier in the year, Amazon has raised the price of their Prime membership.

Reads the email I received as a Prime user early this morning:

We are writing to provide you advance notice that the price of your Prime membership will be increasing. The annual rate will be $99 when your membership renews on xxx, 2014.

Even as fuel and transportation costs have increased, the price of Prime has remained the same for nine years. Since 2005, the number of items eligible for unlimited free Two-Day Shipping has grown from one million to over 20 million. We also added unlimited access to over 40,000 movies and TV episodes with Prime Instant Video and a selection of over 500,000 books to borrow from the Kindle Owners' Lending Library.

For more information about your Prime membership, visit our Prime membership page.

During a recent earnings report, the company had suggested the price of Prime would be going up and there have been rumors that a price hike would also include a new unlimited streaming service for subscribers (think Google Play All Access and Spotify) although this has yet to be confirmed.

Pono, the high-fidelity portable music player, has already surpassed its Kickstarter goal.

The player had a goal of $800,000 which was reached in under 24 hours, and 6,476 backers have contributed $2,112,066.

Pono Players will cost $399 when they launch at retail in October, but 100 lucky backers got it for $199 and all other Kickstarter backers can get it for $299.

What is Pono?

Pono's mission is to provide the best possible listening experience of your favorite music. We want to be very clear that PonoMusic is not a new audio file format or standard. PonoMusic is an end-to-end ecosystem for music lovers to get access to and enjoy their favorite music exactly as the artist created it, at the recording resolution they chose in the studio. We offer PonoMusic customers the highest resolution digital music available. PonoMusic is more than just a high-resolution music store and player; it is a grassroots movement to keep the heart of music beating. PonoMusic aims to preserve the feeling, spirit, and emotion that the artists put in their original studio recordings.

Google has acquired Green Throttle Games, perhaps signaling that a true Google Android set-top box may be on the way with gaming foundations.

The company used to make its Atlas controller for Android devices, before shuttering four months ago. Google has picked up the technology and former employees (including founders) for an undisclosed price.

Atlas controllers needed to be synced to the company's Atlas Arena app, which was removed from the Google Play Store late last year, making the hardware effectively useless.

Sources claim Google purchased the company to enhance the Bluetooth capabilities of its own upcoming set-top box and controller, one that has been oft-rumored but never confirmed.

Green Throttle's hardware woes mixed with Ouya shuttering its hardware business and moving towards software and services only likely has marked the death of the independent gaming console market, and the beginning of the battle of titans including Amazon, Apple, Google and possibly Microsoft.

It has been discovered that popular cross-platform messenger WhatsApp has a vulneranability that could make Android users susceptible to their conversations being read by other apps.

Even with the company's major update for Android this week, Bas Bosschert, CTO at DoubleThink, has posted a method to accessing WhatsApp chats, using an exploit in the service's encryption.

Bosschert (via TCrunch) explains how it works:

"WhatsApp for Android stores conversations on the phone's SD card, which is accessible by many other apps on the phone as long as the user gives those apps the permissions they ask for (many apps ask for full access to the phone). This is an infrastructure issue for Android more than a gaping security flaw on the part of WhatsApp.

From there, a malicious app could access the WhatsApp conversation database. Savvy users will note that this is hardly a hack but more of a problem with Android's data sandboxing system."

Last week, Spotify announced it had acquired The Echo Nest, a company "that powers the vast majority of internet radio" with its technology and music curating services.

For example, The Echo Nest powers Twitter Music, Rdio, Vevo, MTV, MOG, IHeartRadio and more.

With the acquisition, however, Echo Nest is losing at least one customer: Rdio.

Rdio says it will "discontinue the arrangement because it doesn't want to share its data with competitors."

Notes Rdio CEO Anthony Bay: "As far as we are concerned, they were a good partner, but we have other good partners and we'll move on. We, probably like most people, have multiple sources of data that we use. So we will stop using that source of data and use other sources."

Earlier this week, Rovio teased their upcoming 'Angry Birds' game with a video showing a bird hiding in a suit of armor and the tagline of "it will be epic."

Well, the new game, soft launching in Canada and Australia, is actually called 'Angry Birds Epic' and will be a step away from their traditional games.

The latest will be an adventure RPG with turn-based combat, and will also include a crafting system (popular in many other games). Finally, the company says the game will have a "challenging endgame."

As part of the crafting system, gamers can use in-game currency to build armor, weapons, potions, etc, and the currency can be won or purchased through Rovio for real money.

After its soft launch this week, the title will see a global launch for iOS, Android and Windows Phone 8 later in the year.

AngryBirdsNest had the scoop and some extra pics:

For the second time in two weeks, Twitter was temporarily down today, due to a software glitch.

The popular microblogging service was down for about 45 minutes starting at 1PM EST.

On March 2nd, during the Oscars, Twitter crashed briefly as well following Ellen DeGeneres' now famous "selfie" hit the service and quickly saw over 3 million retweets.

Read Twitter's status update: "Update [12:12pm PDT]: During a planned deploy in one of our core services, we experienced unexpected complications that made Twitter unavailable for many users starting at 11:01am. We rolled back the change as soon as we identified the issue and began a controlled recovery to ensure stability of other parts of the service. The site was fully recovered by 11:47am PDT. We apologize for the inconvenience. "

In its younger years, Twitter was infamous for downtime that sometimes extended for hours on end. The "fail whale" became the unoffical symbol of Twitter before it invested millions in 2013 to make sure the site stayed up.

Microsoft has revealed the release date for their Power Covers for Surface tablets, with the accessory shipping on March 19th.

The cover will significantly extend the battery life of Surface Pro, Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 tablets. Microsoft claims the accessory will extend life by up to 70 percent, which could make the devices much more productive and portable.

Weighing in at 1.2 pounds, the cover is also over 18mm thick, not necessarily small. It also does not include back-lit keys, which the standard Type covers do.

The Covers were announced back in October when the company unveiled their new tablets.

Microsoft is making the Power Covers available in the U.S., Japan and Canada first. In the U.S. it will retail for $199.

'Star Citizen', the upcoming combat simulator game for Windows, has reached another crowd funding milestone: $40 million.

The game, which will feature space combat within a MMO universe, and single player action, as well, has been hugely popular since word of its development began in 2012. The game will be one of the first to support the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. Developed by 'Wing Commander' creator Chris Roberts, the game has seen 405,289 backers averaging nearly $100 each, much more than an average gamer spends on games.

As part of reaching their goal, the chairman has posted a message explaining what features will be added now that the milestone has been hit.

We've done it again! The Star Citizen community has pushed us to another incredible crowd funding goal: $40 million, a number that would have been an impossible dream at the start of the game's development. I'm constantly amazed by the continued support we receive and how this community manages to grow every day. Since the last milestone we've added over 10,000 new citizens! Some say that space sims are niche. I'm not so sure!

Instagram has put together a major update for its Android app.

The app was first launched in April 2012, and is now supported by most Android devices (unless your device is really old), but there have been very little improvements to the aesthetics of the application.

Says Instagram of the new update: "These changes mean a faster, more responsive app. Your profile screen now loads twice as fast, and we've cut the overall app size in half to increase speed throughout Instagram.

By making our design cleaner, we've also made Instagram for Android easier to use. We've simplified our visuals throughout our app, making use of valuable screen space for small devices and feature phones and rearranging our design to keep buttons within easy reach as you navigate the app on a larger device.

It's the same Instagram for Android you know and love--faster, cleaner and easier to use than ever."

In practice, you'll see an updated and redesigned camera screen and icons which will look similar to what iOS users see. Outside of the look and feel changes, there are no added features with the most recent update.

Google has confirmed that its popular Chromecast HDMI dongle will be headed to "many more countries" in the next month.

Android/Chrome boss Sundar Pichai, speaking during the company's SXSW keynote, noted the timetable for the global releases.

Pinchai noted that sales were in the "millions" of units, and unit sales growth has continued rapidly.

Google recently made the SDK available to developers, so the device's limited applications should see an increase in the near future. A global expansion should help in that department, as well.

Samsung has denied that a major fire at a factory in South Korea will lead to less supply of the upcoming Galaxy S5 at launch.

The factory in Anseong was being used to manufacture PCBs (printed circuit boards) for the new flagship.

Damage has been estimated at nearly $1 billion and it took over 280 firefighters to contain the fire. The fire began Sunday morning local time, and burned through equipment and components. It took about six hours to put the fire out.

Samsung has said the fire will not affect the April 11th launch of the device, and the company uses other PCB factories, as well.

Availability in certain smaller markets could be affected still, but most likely you will not have to worry.

The optical disc is not dead yet.

Sony and Panasonic have unveiled their new Archival Disc format aimed at users who need long-term storage, with disc capacities ranging from 300GB to 1TB per disc.

Says Sony: "Optical discs have excellent properties to protect themselves against the environment, such as dust-resistance and water-resistance, and can also withstand changes in temperature and humidity when stored. They also allow inter-generational compatibility between different formats, ensuring that data can continue to be read even as formats evolve. This makes them robust media for long-term storage of content. Recognizing that optical discs will need to accommodate much larger volumes of storage going forward, particularly given the anticipated future growth in the archive market, Sony and Panasonic have been engaged in the joint development of a standard for professional-use next-generation optical discs."

The companies had originally announced the development of the discs, last summer, but have now unveiled the technology roadmap and specs, along with the new logo.

Both companies will launch systems with writing capabilities of 300GB per disc starting in the summer of 2015, with eventually capacity reaching 1TB. The discs are dual-sided and triple layer.

Pinterest has published their first transparency report this week, with the promise that they will release on every six months.

Interestingly, the company had 12 government data requests for the second half of 2013, including seven warrants and five subpoenas.

The breakdown of law enforcement requests were four from California, two from Florida, two from Utah and one from New York, Oregon and Wisconsin, The 12th request was from a federal agency.

Pinterest says it gives notice to users whose information has been requested, unless the law prohibited it, which was the case for three of the requests. The company refused to give info for one of the requests.

"Every company that stores information -- from banks to phone companies to email providers -- must respond to requests for that information from folks like law enforcement agencies, courts, and others," Pinterest explained. "We think it's important that you know about these requests."

Seeing increasing pressure from rival carrier T-Mobile, AT&T dropped the price of its family plans earlier in the year and has followed up that move by dropping the price for some of its individual and two-line plans.

Beginning this week, customers can get an individual plan with 2GB of shared data for $65 per month, down from the $80 it currently is. The plan you will need to purchase is the AT&T Mobile Share Value Plan, which means you are getting no subsidies for your smartphone but there is no 2-year contract.

T-Mobile has really turned the U.S. market on its head since last year, getting rid of contracts and device subsidies but offering plans with the most value for the buck, and extra features like free international roaming.

Verizon has made small price cuts, and Sprint continues to try to play catch-up by creating their "Framily" plans.

AT&T has also announced that it will give customers a one-time $100 credit for each new line of service, a nice introductory offer.